Free Downriver by Loren D. Estleman

about ten inches long. He saw me looking at it and balanced it on his palm.
    “I was a dog-damn good printer before they offsetted me clean out of the business. I got enough of this in the attic to sink the Boblo boat.”
    “Where’s the gun?”
    “Hell, the wife won’t have one in the house since Davy. Them the ones?”
    I held out the crutches. He stuck the lead bar in his hip pocket and took them, fitting them under his own arms. He had a wide mouth and deep creases in his forehead and eyes like shotgun pellets lodged in cracks. And gray hair and a thick neck. So had a lot of older black men, including the one who had helped drive DeVries and me into the lake, if Hank Wakely told the truth.
    “A mite tall for Emmaline,” said the old man, testing his weight on the aluminum. “She knee-high to a pig knuckle.”
    “They’re adjustable. Just loosen the screws there and there and slide up the bottoms.”
    He leaned the crutches in a corner. “Take a load off, son. Can I get you something cold? They’s all kinds of pop and juice in the icebox. No beer, though. The wife don’t hold with spirits. Won’t have them in the house.”
    We were in a living room paneled in woodgrain vinyl with a nylon rug and three chairs and a sofa covered in knobby synthetic. Nothing expensive, but nothing old and worn out either, and all of it very clean. The one quality item was an antique sideboard older than the house, with family pictures on it in brass and silver frames. Several of them featured a more slender, much younger version of Cleveland J. Jackson, wearing a style of clothing not yet designed when he was a youth. The wide mouth was built for smiling. “Davy?” I asked.
    “That boy liked having his pitcher took. I did too, his age. You know you got old when you start walking away from cameras. How about that cold one?”
    “Thanks, I’m fine. How does Mrs. Jackson stand on tobacco?”
    “Won’t have it in the house. But she upstairs snoozing.” He picked up a candy dish from the end table between the chairs, tipped the peppermints out into another dish containing caramels in plastic wrappers, and set the empty dish down next to my elbow. I lit up and placed the match in the dish. It was close in the room and most of the peppermints were fused together in a bright lump. I asked if Mrs. Jackson had had an accident.
    “Slipped in some water at the post office last February and busted her hip.” He took a seat in the chair nearest mine, grunted, took the lead bar out of his hip pocket, and laid it on the table. “She gets around with a walker but I don’t want her getting used to it. You gots to keep moving, son. That’s the secret.”
    “Any lawyers knock on your door?”
    “Like woodpeckers in heat. I should sue the government, let my dead sister’s junkie kid Delmer collect when we’re in the ground? Anyway, the wife don’t like to cause no fuss. You say Richie’s out?”
    “They sprang him day before yesterday.”
    “What’s it been, ten-twelve years?”
    “Twenty. They paroled him.”
    “Dog-damn. Don’t seem twenty. Bet it does to him, though. How’s he look?”
    “Does it matter?”
    “Sure. Him and Davy was some tight. I always thought that boy was headed for a fall, though. He was just too angry. You don’t know what it was like to be black and angry in ’sixty-seven. They was restaurants around here wouldn’t serve us. Someone busted in your house with a gun, you called the cops, they might come out before the end of the shift if it wasn’t too far and their feet didn’t hurt. White folks half your age calling you boy, and them was the friendly ones. It was like that if you lived invisible and didn’t talk back. Otherwise they come down on you like a bucket of shit. Davy he went bad, I knew he’d get hisself chewed up; when they called and said he was dead it was like he been that way a long time. But I was scared for Richie. He had a chance to pull hisself out. I see him slapping that